Electronic devices, such as smartphones, tablet computers, wearable devices, and Internet-of-things devices, have become ubiquitous. The electronic devices often wirelessly communicate with remote servers and/or other devices over various types of networks and connections, such as wireless local area networking (WLAN) (e.g., Wi-Fi, etc.), wireless wide area networking (WWAN) (e.g., LTE, CDMA, GSM, etc.), and personal area networking (PAN) (e.g., Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc.). The wireless communication between devices is an increasingly important aspect of modern technology. Data may be transmitted and received by the electronic devices in order to facilitate the use of the electronic devices. For example, users of electronic devices may be able to communicate using email, phone calls, SMS, etc. by receiving and transmitting data via a connection.
Such communication can be via a variety of means over different types of networks. For example, devices may communicate via SMS over a wide area network, via a wireless local area network, or via a PAN or peer-to-peer network. In the case of peer-to-peer networks, devices communicate directly with each other (i.e., a message is sent directly from a first device to a second device without any intermediate steps). In order for devices to establish a peer-to-peer connection, the devices must first discover each other. With currently used methods, devices often cannot discover each other until they are on a common network or by periodically scanning for other devices. However, this can impact battery life on the devices and/or the efficiency of wireless medium. Further, discovery may fail for other reasons including electromagnetic interference, a captive portal on a common access point, firewalls, failure of multicast response, restriction of multicast/broadcast packets by a RADIUS controller, etc.